A 3D beam-forming technology is an important technology for improving cell resource utilization and solving an inter-cell interference problem, the basic idea of which is to simultaneously utilize beams in a horizontal direction and a perpendicular direction, so as to achieve higher space reusability and improve the throughput of a system.
The implementation of 3D beam-forming usually needs cooperation with multiple groups of antennae, which involves a pilot design problem under a complex antenna configuration. At present, during channel measurement in R10, different pilot configurations are adopted for different specific antenna port quantity, such as pilot configurations respectively supporting transmission through 1 port, transmission through 2 ports, transmission through 4 ports and transmission through 8 ports, and having corresponding pilot transmission patterns. In the future, the number of antenna ports may be sharply increased in many application scenarios, for example, 16 ports, 64 ports and the like may occur, at which moment, if pilot mapping still depends on the number of the antenna ports, then excessively high pilot overheads and excessive resource occupation will inevitably be caused, thereby affecting the spectral efficiency of the system. Therefore, it is necessary to improve the conventional pilot configurations for pilot measurement to solve the pilot configuration problem under the condition of sharp increase in the number of the antenna ports.